The greatest purveyor of violence in the world

GUEST: Josh Rubner, National Advocacy Director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and former analyst in Middle East Affairs at Congressional Research Service, discusses his new book, “Shattered Hopes: Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” (prerecorded)

This is the first part of a talk given in December of 2014. Josh Rubner tells it like it is about the suffering in Gaza, and the US role in letting Israel get away with murder. 

Many things about our system upset me: its corruption, its greed, its materialism, its racist criminal justice system. But I have to admit, what bothers me most is my country's part in the slaughter of the Palestinians. To have our Congress vote to support the most recent attack on Gaza, while over 500 Palestinian children were being killed by US supplied weaponry will go down in history as a vivid example of how the empire lost its moral compass. There is no excuse for our government committing such heinous crimes. 

Granted, 500 children dying may just end up being a footnote in some history book. But the chapter will be on America's war crimes, from Korea to Vietnam, and continuing through the carnage the US has caused in the Middle East. What country will be publishing this history book, I do not know. Whether the human race will even have a history that extends that far is another open question. 

What I do know is that my country has been "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" for my generation. And like Martin Luther King, Jr and many before him, I grieve for what my homeland has become.